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Recent logo designs

It’s been a long time since an update to my blog here, mainly because I got a day job that was partly as a blogger! You know what it’s like, if you do a job at work it’s hard to come home and do the same kind of thing in your spare time. Anyway, I’ve had the recent ‘good’ news of being made part-time, so I have much more time and inclination to work on Design Reviews. Please indulge me and have a look at some recent logo designs I have worked on. Of these only one was successfully adopted by a customer, and even that one I preferred an alternative design I’d made.

Starting with that the logo for WebProjectNW (North West). My favoured proposed logo followed by the actually adopted logo.

WebProjectNW, my favourite

WebProjectNW, customer adopted this logo

WebProjectNW is a pretty good site too, it links up web developers and people who want websites in North West England. It’s a bit like MyBuilder which I recently used to find an electrician to work on my house, with excellent results.

Moving onwards, some un-adopted logos that I made recently and think are quite fab;

Navartis

Lawrence Kent Photography

BITS logo and Wild at Heart logo

LuxyBid

Finally, for my good friend Mike over at FileQuake.com, a new logo for his wonderful download archive/reviews site. It might be getting restyled soon using one of the branding ideas below, watch that space!

FileQuake variations

Wabi-Sabi, the beauty of imperfection

Apr 2nd, 2009

by DRMark.

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Isn’t being perfect a bit weird? Well it is for us humans, but for the things we covet and buy a lot of the stuff can possibly be ‘perfectly formed’. Shiny new iPod, shiny new BMW etc etc. That is until you get up to the very high end of things, oddly, where ‘hand made’, ‘craft’ and ‘characterful’ become major selling points. Now words like rustic, antique and crafted replace flawless, pristine and precision made.

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aesthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, halftoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.

distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new

Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.

As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.

I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!

Pop Art coffee cups

Mar 26th, 2009

by DRMark.

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I’ve always liked pop art. And you can see some Roy Lichtenstein influenced enjoyment of halftone patterns used in illustrator in one of the previous posts here at Design Reviews. This post about pop art though is a bit of an accident. I wanted to create a logo originally, for a cafe. As everyone knows a logo should only contain very simple, minimal art or graphic symbols. It’s also best to make it work in single color or posterised. Pop art is often low in colour and detail so it can be a good inspiration for shapes in creating logotypes with the illustrator pen tool.

I wanted a great cup symbol or shape within my logo so I thought I’d take a look around the web for some simple graphical representations of cups. Looking at these I thought I would spot some shapes to complement the letter forms in the logo. But I didn’t really. I did come across a great resource site though.

Pop Art Machine is the place, I’d never been to this site before. To quote the site’s description “…collects, curates and creates pop art. Our focus is painting and printmaking using public image sources as inspiration. Here you will find over one million free source images and finished pop art posters & prints.”

Sounds good and it is good. The image on the left below is my interpretation of one of the cup images on the site. Using a not too far removed technique I drew the image on the right from an actual photograph. The technique I’m talking about it that once you’ve drawn a clear crisp precise vector shape to your liking you then use the pencil tool to ‘lasso’ the shape roughly. Then you make it the same color as the surface, changed with the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) sliders in lightness/darkness only. Also on the cup on the right I sliced up the saucer with Beziers and the ‘divide objects below’ command. Of course anyone who’s used illustrator knows I’ve finished it off by using one of the ink brushes for the strokes around the shapes. It’s quite pleasing to the eye but would only work as a simple icon sized graphic I think.

two cups yesterday

Above is the result of this work and inspiration. The illustrator source file is here for anyone to download and use as they wish. The logo didn’t really work though…

Technorati Profile

Image search by similarity

Jan 12th, 2009

by DRMark.

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There are lots of reasons people might want to look for an image on the web based upon similarity with other images. For me, I had created a new logo and wanted to make sure it was 100% original. Sometimes when I’ve made a logo in the past it has an air of familiarity and look of an established brand, even though it’s just been born on the Illustrator artboard. But you’ve really got to check, because you don’t want to give a client a logo which they will later, no doubt, find out looks just like some other company’s.

Sonoran logo, it's so good, can it be original?!?!

There are lots of design web pages illustrating this error, or plagiarism. Look at this one for example. So what do you do? I heard about an interesting new technology recently on a more geeky website. It described a new kind of search engine, not just a normal image search but you could search for ‘similar images’. A few weeks ago I’d already tried a web page that harnessed Flikr to find images of similar colours; the Flikr Color Selectr. This is a cool web page to browse but not useful for the purpose I set out at the beginning of this article.

There are a few alternatives I have found to address the wish for searching through images for similarity, unfortunately some of them are just previews and presentations about what they are going to do in the future;

Imprezzeo
GazoPa – needs someone to invite you!?! You can use it from ‘facebook’, which I’ve never looked at, according to a Reuters story
Microsoft live search (couldn’t find this feature, but it’s been touted)
Typhoon images similarity search – only works for typhoons!

All the above were basically useless to me! But there was one that worked and showed promise, though by their own admission the image database held was relatively small. The winner is;

TinEye

Yes, exactly what I wanted! I had to make an account though, which was really easy. Then you upload the image and click the search similar button… In the case of the logo I’d designed(above) it came up with no matches! So I feel like it must be quite original. When I uploaded it I just uploaded the symbol from the logo, just to make it easier for the algorithm.

If you know any different, or if you know of better ‘similar image search’ engines please let me know in the comments section. Thanks, Mark.

15 logos in 15 minutes, the road to Taichung City

Nov 18th, 2008

by DRMark.

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The streets of Taiwan are teeming with businesses, it’s very rare to see a residential only area. Commonly the houses have 3 or 4 floors with the ground floor used as some kind of shop, all the shops are open to at least 10pm. In quieter cities you might go in to a store and the family is there watching TV or eating so you feel intrusive.

Anyway all these shops have many kinds of logos, some don’t, they just have some Chinese writing. Last week on my way to Taichung City (pop. 1,064,440) I shot these logos with my phone-cam, an old Sony K800i. Partly because of my inspiration from LogoDesignLove and partly because some of the logos are cool, stylish or funny. Take a look below, 15 logos in 15 minutes…

Traveling to Taichung city centre, I shot these logos with my cameraphone

Have you every ventured into Pants Kingdom or La Fatte? Everyone must recognise Domino’s Pizza. Now I wish I’d spent more time taking some more/better shots.

Cheers, Mark

To 3D or not to 3D?

Oct 5th, 2008

by DRMark.

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Is 3D in the non-interactive and non-animated design side of things a bit stale and shopworn?

It seems so, even clients have asked “no 3D effects”, not that I wanted to do any… So it seems like it’s a thing to avoid, a furry dice of the graphic design world now. In fact there has been a consciously flat movement for many years, flat colours, no gradients, no shadows and no 3D. However it seems perspective effects are still quite popular and isometric effects have been cool for a few years. What do you think, is 3D often used to put lipstick on a pig?

Distressed/eroded effects in Illustrator

Oct 3rd, 2008

by DRMark.

No comments yet

I had call to make a logo for a client today, but rather than wanting a nice shiny new logo this client requested something that looked aged, corroded and distressed – a little!

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results.

What do you think? Do you know a better or faster way to make distressed effects?

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Recent logo designs

Wabi-Sabi, the beauty of imperfection

Pop Art coffee cups

Image search by similarity

15 logos in 15 minutes, the road to Taichung City

To 3D or not to 3D?

Distressed/eroded effects in Illustrator

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